Tank Girl

Last year was the 30th anniversary of the British comic book Tank Girl. There wasn’t much mention of it in the press, that I remember. It is a classic cult comic. So, why not? Admittedly, the 1995 movie stunk.

It only made $6 million against a $25 million budget. That is an apt metaphor for the post-Nirvanamania alternative craze of the 1990’s. Mega-corporations foolishly believed that they could reproduce “the next Nirvana” by slapping “grunge” or “alternative” on everything. They bought up hundreds of independent labels and signed artists left and right, regardless of any talent or experience they may possess. It doesn’t work like that. Mostly, they failed spectacularly.

But, nonetheless, I liked the idea of adapting this comic into a movie. Comic book movies are HUGE now, compared to the 1990’s. Can’t somebody else give it ago? Hey Hollywood, throw some money my way! I’ll do it!

One thing that I actually LIKED about the original movie was the animated sequences. So, firstly, animate the entire thing. Co-creator Jamie Hewlett went on to form the virtual band Gorillaz. It would be a natural fit for him to direct. And don’t wimp out with a PG version. Go for a solid R-rating. It could be badass as Heavy Metal (1981).

Second, it needs better casting. Lori Petty? Blecchh! Stay true to the source material and get an Australian cast. This takes place in a post-apocalyptic Australia. Maybe include a few Brits or Americans in certain roles. But, c’mon, Ice-T as a kangaroo? Are you shitting me? Eddie Izzard plays a great villain. Get him. I kinda liked that the fascist water company ruled everything in the original. Keep that. Put Eddie in charge. Make him a middle management Darth Vader for a multi-national monopoly.

The original soundtrack had a few good tunes. I could see staying with that sort of tone; punk rock, hip-hop, metal, indie pop, etc. Courtney Love chose songs for the original. Get Quentin Tarantino’s music supervisor to do the reboot.

If Hollywood insists on bombarding us with reboots, don’t ruin perfectly good movies PLEASE! Reboot movies that had a good premise, but were shit produced, and fix them. There is no shortage of them. Comic book movies are BIG now. So, it isn’t even much of a gamble anymore. I bet that any independent studio could do a decent job of it with a small budget. Jamie Hewlett’s success with the Gorillaz could almost guarantee a bigger budget with a few well-known actors. Someone make this happen!

Vlogging Update: May 2017

BIG EYES & MOUTH FIREPAINT.png

Hey y’all,

Sorry for the long absence.

My computer died.

I gave it to my aunt to work on.

She does IT work for the local school district.

Unable to fix it, she gave me another one that a school was getting rid of.

I tried to salvage what I could from the old one.

But, most of my programs and files were lost.

I’ve been searching for the missing software and restoring what I can.

My scanner/printer didn’t want to cooperate with the new computer.

I tried replacing it.

But, the replacements didn’t work either.

After a couple of days messing with it, I finally got it running.

My van has a million problems.

But, at least I got the front tire fixed that kept going flat.

I’ve replaced that tire THREE TIMES and it still kept going flat.

I thought maybe the rim was bent.

I had it looked at and they found a piece of metal lodged inside.

They patched it up.

Now, it shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Only cost me $15 bucks (thank God)!

I tried to repay my grandmother $700 dollars I owe her.

She forgave some of it.

My ex forgave the $200 I owed her, too, since I’ve been helping her relocate and move her stuff.

Not sure how I’ll get my other debts paid.

But, I try not to get stressed out about it.

That really fucks up my creativity.

With One Simple Sentence, ABC News Confirms The Death of Beltway Journalism

With One Simple Sentence, ABC News Confirms The Death of Beltway Journalism
from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by Eric Boehlert

It’s from an online report about the Obama school “controversy,” and it’s written by Dan Harris. In his piece, Harris notes that conservatives pre-emptively blasted Obama’s stay-in-school speech even though conservatives had no idea what was going to be in the speech. Harris notes that the speech itself “turned out to be little more than a pep talk on the importance of staying in school.”

Later in the piece as he tries to put the “controversy” in context, Harris uncorks this era-defining gem [emphasis added]:

While the media loves a good fight — even when the charges are unfounded — there may be more to conservatives’ complaints that play into larger concerns about the president on health care reform.
Behold the wonder. Pretty much sums up the state of affairs, right? “The media loves a good fight–even when the charges are unfounded.”

And do I even have to mention that the media’s new-found love of unfounded fights is an Obama era special. Or can somebody point me towards the manufactured, unfounded “controversies” hatched during the Bush years that the press treated as big news. (As I’ve noted, when conservatives–and overwhelming white–activists get mad, it’s news. When liberals do it, it’s annoying.)

If that weren’t bad enough, there were other depressing nuggets from Harris’ woeful report. First, he quoted three partisan Obama critics in the story, yet somehow managed to avoid a single Democrat or Obama supporter for his report.

And second, then there was this:

While Obama may have run a successful presidential campaign, critics say the White House has been unprepared for the ferocity of the Republican opposition.
“You have to be aware of the opposition that is going to arise and have a plan to deal with it,” [former Gov. Mitt Romney spokesman Kevin] Madden said.

Did you get that? According to a partisan Republican, the Obama WH was to blame for the school “controversy,” because it should have seen the firestorm coming. It should have known that by having the President of the United States address school children and urge them to excel and stay in school, that Republicans and wingnuts would accuse him of trying to “indoctrinate” kids with a “socialist” agenda.

I mean really, how did the WH not see that one coming, right?

So to summarize: ABC News confirms that it will chase any right-wing “fight” even if it’s baseless; even if it’s “unfounded.” In reporting those fights, ABC News will purposefully exclude Democrat voices from the story. And ABC News, while acknowledging a fight is “unfounded,” will allow partisan Republicans to blame the White House for the “controversy.”

R.I.P., indeed.

Crossposted at County Fair, a Media Matters blog.

Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/EricBoehlert


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Breaking Three Years of Silence: Alex Jones Interviews Charlie Sheen

Breaking Three Years of Silence: Alex Jones Interviews Charlie Sheen

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

In the audio clip below, aired today on the Alex Jones Show, Charlie Sheen, popular actor and winner of the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series, tells Alex Jones why he wrote “20 Minutes with the President,” an open letter to president Barack Obama calling for a new investigation into the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“Enough stonewalling,” Sheen told Jones, “enough media manipulation, enough media-mantra speak. The families deserve better, America deserves better.”

Charlie said he cannot sit idly by and hope that a new investigation will “fall out of the heavens and into our Congress.” We must demand Obama deliver “honest promises,” Sheen explained. We must demand a new investigation.

Alex mentioned John Farmer, a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, who revealed earlier this year that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11. Other members have said that the Pentagon and the government were engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack. Farmer’s book about his experiences working for the Commission is entitled The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, and is set to be released this month (see Paul Joseph Watson, 9/11 Commission Counsel: Government Agreed to Lie About 9/11).

Charlie said the call for a new investigation will not be silenced by the corporate media. “This message will not be silence anymore by the media-fueled mantras insisting on how they feel and deciding for them [the American people and most importantly the victim family members] for eight long years what can thought, what can be said, what can be asked..”

Alex noted that even as the whitewash commission conducted its hearings, there were outraged family members in the audience demanding the truth be told. Charlie added that these family members were ignored by the commission and thus deeply offended. The questions they asked “never saw the light of day” and their words never found their way into the final report generated by the commission, itself a fraud as Farmer others have noted. “We know that [the families] have been calling for a new investigation,” Sheen noted.

The government is demanding the public suspend logical thought and dismiss all questions about the investigation’s report, which is a work of fiction, in essence a fairy tale, Charlie argued. The establishment, he said, demands we worship a new form of physics and accept a “new form of reality that is inconsistent with everything we know in each and every cell of our entire being.” The American people are instructed by the government to believe such obvious nonsense and then are systematically demonized for asking questions, he explained.

The official 9/11 story is “an absolute fairy tale,” Charlie declared, “a complete work of fiction, and not even a very good one.”

Sheen hopes “20 Minutes with the President” will get Obama’s attention. “If for some reason this doesn’t make it into his hands and I am never granted 20 minutes with my president, I would urge the American people — I would urge anybody and everybody that has a stake in this, which would be all of us — to continue to apply the pressure, to continue to ask the questions, to continue to demand the truth.”

Charlie Sheen will further expand on his open letter this Friday on the Alex Jones Show.


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Twenty Minutes with the President

Twenty Minutes with the President

Reported by Charlie Sheen
Infowars
Tuesday, September 8, 2009

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with our 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, while he was out promoting his health care reform initiative. I requested 30 minutes given the scope and detail of my inquiry; they said I could have 20. Twenty minutes, 1200 seconds, not a lot of time to question the President about one of the most important events in our nation’s history. The following is a transcript of our remarkable discussion.

————————————————————————————————————————

Charlie Sheen – Good afternoon Mr. President, thank you so much for taking time out of your demanding schedule.

President Barack Obama – My pleasure, the content of your request seemed like something I should carve out a few minutes for.

CS – I should point out that I voted for you, as your promises of hope and change, transparency and accountability, as well as putting government back into the hands of the American people, struck an emotional chord in me that I hadn’t felt in quite some time, perhaps ever.

PBO – And I appreciate that Charlie. Big fan of the show, by the way.

CS – Sir, I can’t imagine when you might find the time to actually watch my show given the measure of what you inherited.

PBO – I have it Tivo’d on Air Force One. Nice break from the traveling press corps. (He glances at his watch) not to be abrupt or to rush you, but you have 19 minutes left.

CS – I’ll take that as an invitation to cut to the chase.

PBO – I’m all ears. Or so I’ve been told.

CS – Sir, in the very near future we will be experiencing our first 9/11 anniversary with you as Commander in Chief.

PBO – Yes. A very solemn day for our Nation. A day of reflection and yet a day of historical consciousness as well.

CS – Very much so sir, very much so indeed…. Now; In researching your position regarding the events of 9/11 and the subsequent investigation that followed, am I correct to understand that you fully support and endorse the findings of the commission report otherwise known as the ‘official story’?

PBO – Do I have any reason not to? Given that most of us are presumably in touch with similar evidence.

CS – I really wish that were the case, sir. Are you aware, Mr. President, of the recent stunning revelations that sixty percent of the 9/11 commissioners have publicly stated that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11 and that the Pentagon was engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack?

PBO – I am aware of certain “in fighting” during the course of their very thorough and tireless investigative process.

CS – Mr. President, it’s hard to label this type of friction as “in fighting” or make the irresponsible leap to “thorough,” when the evidence I insist you examine regarding 6 of the 10 members are statements of fact.

(At this point one of Obama’s senior aides approaches the President and whispers into his ear. Obama glances quickly at his watch and nods as the aide resumes his post at the doorway, directly behind me.)

PBO – No disrespect Mr. Sheen, but I have to ask; what is it that you seem to be implying with the initial direction of this discussion?

CS – I am not implying anything Mr. President. I am here to present the facts and see what you plan to do with them.

PBO – Let me guess; your ‘facts,’ allegedly supporting these claims are in the folders you brought with you?

CS – Good guess Mr. President.

(I hand the first folder of documents to the President)

CS – Again sir, these are not my opinions or assumptions, this is all a matter of public record, reported through mainstream media, painstakingly fact checked and verified.

(the President glances into the folder I handed him)

CS – You’ll notice sir on page one of the dossier dated August of ‘06 from the Washington Post, the statements of John Farmer, senior council to the 9/11 commission, his quote stating, “I was shocked how different the truth was from the way it was described.”

PBO – (as he glances down at the report, almost inaudible) …. um hmm….

CS – He goes on to further state “The [NORAD Air Defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years….”

(the President continues to view the documents)

CS – On pages two and three, sir, are the statements, as well, from commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, commissioners Bob Kerrey, Timothy Roemer and John Lehman, as well as the statements of commissioner Max Cleland, an ex-Senator from Georgia , who resigned, stating:

“It is a national scandal. This investigation is now compromised. One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up.”

He also described President Bush’s desire to delay the process as not to damage the ‘04 re-election bid. They suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. Mr. President, this information alone is unequivocally grounds for a new investigation!

PBO – Mistakes were clearly made but we as a people and as a country need to move forward. It is obviously in our best interest as a democratic society to focus our efforts and our resources on the future of this great nation and our ability to protect the American people and our allies from this type of terrorism in the coming years.

CS – Sir, how can we focus on the future when THE COMMISSION ITSELF is on record stating that they still do not know the truth??

PBO – Even if what you state, might in some capacity, begin to approach an open discussion or balanced debate, I can’t speak for, or about the decisions certain commission members made during an extremely difficult period. Perhaps you should be interviewing them instead of me. Wait, don’t tell me; I was easier to track down than they were?

CS – Not exactly sir, but let’s be honest. You’re the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, the buck stops with you. 9/11 has been the pretext for the systematic dismantling of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Your administration is reading from the same playbook that the Bush administration foisted on America through documented secrecy and deception.

PBO – Mr. Sheen, I’m having a difficult time sitting here and listening to you draw distorted parallels between the Bush/Cheney regime and mine.

CS – Mr. President the parallels are not distorted just because you say they are. Let’s stick to the facts. You promised to abolish the Patriot Act and then voted to re-authorize it. You pledged to end warrantless wire tapping against the American people and now energetically defend it. You decried the practice of rendition and now continue it. You promised over and over again on the campaign trail, that you would end the practice of indefinite detention and instead, you have expanded it to permanent detention of “detainees” without trial. This far exceeds the outrages of the former administration. Call me crazy Mr. President, but is this not your record?

PBO – Mr. Sheen, my staff and I authorized this interview based on your request to discuss 9/11 and deliver some additional information you’re convinced I’d not previously reviewed. Call me crazy, But it appears as though you’ve blindly wandered off topic.

CS – Sir, the examples I just illustrated are a direct result of 9/11.

PBO – And I’m telling you that we must move forward, we must endure through these dangerous and politically challenging years ahead.

CS – Mr. President, we cannot move forward with a bottomless warren of unanswered questions surrounding that day and its aftermath.

PBO – I read the official report. Every word every page. Perhaps you should do the same.

CS – I have sir, and so have thousands of family members of the victims, and guess what; they have the same questions I do and probably a lot more. I didn’t lose a loved one on that horrific day Mr. President and neither did you. But since then I, along with millions of other Americans lost something we held true and dear for most of our lives in this great country of ours; we lost our hope.

PBO – And I’d like to believe that I am here to restore that hope. To restore confidence in your leaders, in the system that the voting public chose through a peaceful transfer of power.

(An odd moment of silence between us. Precious time ticking away).

CS – Mr. President, are you aware of the number of days it took to begin the investigation into JFK’s assassination?

PBO – If memory serves I believe it was two weeks.

CS – Close. Seventeen days to be exact. Are you aware sir, how long it took to begin the investigation into Pearl Harbor?

PBO – I would say again about….two weeks.

CS – Close again sir, eleven days to be exact. Are you aware Mr. President how long it took to begin the investigation into 9/11?

PBO – I know it must have seemed like a very long time for all the grieving families.

CS – It was a very long time Mr. President – four hundred and forty days. Roughly 14 months. Does it bother you Mr. President that it only took FIVE HOURS for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the initial attack to recommend and endorse a full scale offensive against Iraq?

PBO – I am not aware of any such purported claim.

CS – I have the proof Mr. President, along with scores of documents and facts I’d like you to take a look at. Here.

(I hand him another file – much thicker than the first)

PBO – I see you came prepared Charlie.

CS – No other way to show up Mr. President. When in doubt over prepare I always say.

PBO – Now you sound like the First Lady.

CS – That’s quite a compliment sir.

PBO – As you wish. Please continue.

CS – Sir, I’d like to direct your attention to the stack of documents in the folder I just handed you. The first in from the top is entitled “ Operation Northwoods“, a declassified Pentagon plan to stage terror attacks on US soil, to be blamed on Cuba as a pretext for war.

PBO – And I’d like to direct your attention to the fact that the principle draftsman of this improbable blueprint was quickly denied a second term as Joint Chiefs chairman and sent packing to a European NATO garrison. Thank God his otherworldly ambitions never saw the light of day.

CS – I wouldn’t be so certain about that Mr. President.

PBO – I could easily say the same to you Charlie.

(the President checks his watch)

CS – The next document reads “Declassified staged provocations.” Now, Honestly Mr. President I wish I was making this stuff up. I’m certain you are familiar with the USS Maine Incident, the sinking of the Lusitania, which we all now know brought us into WW1, and of course the most famous, the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

PBO – Of course I am familiar with these historical events and I’m aware that there’s a measure of controversy surrounding them. But to be quite frank with you, this is all ancient history.

CS – Mr. President, it has been often said; “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” And I concede to you sir, these events are the past.

PBO – A vastly different world young man, shouldering a radically disparate state of universal affairs.

CS – No argument sir, I’m merely inviting you to acknowledge some credibility to the pattern or the theme. Case in point; the next document in your folder. It was published by the think-tank, Project For a New American Century and it’s entitled “ Rebuilding Americas Defenses“, and was written by Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush. To quote from the document sir – (the President interrupts)

PBO – “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

CS – Touche, sir. Your thoughts on this statement Mr. President?

PBO – I would call this a blatant case of misjudgment fueled by an unfortunate milieu of assumption. For some, the uninformed denial of coincidence.

CS – Interesting angle sir. Nevertheless, Vice President Cheney didn’t stop there. In early 2008, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh and MSNBC, both reported that Cheney had proposed to the Pentagon an outrageous plan to have the U.S. Navy create fake Iranian patrol boats, to be manned by Navy Seals, who would then stage an attack on US destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz. This event was to be blamed on Iran and used as a pretext for war. Does any of this information worry you Mr. President? Should we just ignore it, until these realities can be dismissed years from now by our children, as ancient history as well?

PBO – Of course this information worries me, yet it’s not nearly as worrisome as you sitting here today suspiciously implying that 9/11 was somehow allowed to happen or even orchestrated from the inside.

CS – Mr. President I am not suspiciously implying anything. I am merely exposing the documents and asking the questions that nobody in power will even look at or acknowledge. And as I stated earlier, I voted for you, I believed in your message of hope and change. Mr. President I have come to you specifically hoping for a change. A change in the perception that our government has not yet made itself open and accountable to the people. These are your words Mr. President not mine. The lives of thousands were brutally cut short and those left behind to suffer their infinite pain are with me today Mr. President. They are with me in spirit and flesh, and the message we carry will not be silenced anymore by media fueled mantras insisting how they are supposed to feel. Deciding for them, for 8 long years, what can be thought, what can be said, what can be asked.

PBO – And I appreciate your passion, I appreciate your conviction. In spite of your concerns, in spite of what your data might or might not reveal, what you and the families must understand and accept is that we are doing everything we can to protect you.

CS – Mr. President , I realize were very short on time, so please allow me to run down a list of bullet points that might illuminate some reasons why we don’t embrace the warm hug of Federal protection.

PBO – We’ve come this far. Fire away.

CS – Please keep in mind Mr. President everything I’m about to say is documented as fact and part of the public record. The information you are holding in your hands chronicles and verifies each and every point.

PBO – You have five minutes left. The floor is yours. Brief me.

CS – Thank you Mr. President. Okay, first; On the FBI’s most wanted list Osama Bin Laden is not charged with the crimes of 911. When I called the FBI to ask them why this was the case, they replied: “There’s not enough evidence to link Bin Laden to the crime scene,” I later discovered he had never even been indicted by the D.O.J.

CS – Number 2; FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, was dismissed and gagged by the D.O.J. after she revealed that the government had foreknowledge of plans to attack American cities using planes as bombs as early as April 2001. In July of ‘09, Mrs. Edmonds broke the Federal gag order and went public to reveal that Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban were all working for and with the C.I.A. up until the day of 9/11.

CS – Number 3; The following is a quote from Mayor Giuliani during an interview on 9/11 with Peter Jennings for ABC News. “I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the Head of Emergency Management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for 10, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit and got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us.”

WHO TOLD HIM THIS??? To this day, the answer to this question remains unanswered, completely ignored and emphatically DENIED by Mayor Giuliani on several public occasions.

CS – Number 4; In April 2004, USA Today reported, “In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.” One of the targets was the World Trade Center.

CS – Number 5; On September 12th 2007, CNN’s ‘Anderson Cooper 360′, reported that the mysterious “white plane” spotted and videotaped by multiple media outlets, flying in restricted airspace over the White House shortly before 10am on the morning of 9/11, was in fact the Air Force’s E-4B, a specially modified Boeing 747 with a communications pod behind the cockpit; otherwise known as “The Doomsday Plane”.

Though fully aware of the event, the 9/11 Commission did not deem the appearance of the military plane to be of any interest and did not include it in the final 9/11 Commission report.

CS – Number 6; Three F-16s assigned to Andrews Air Force Base, ten miles from Washington, DC, are conducting training exercises in North Carolina 207 miles away as the first plane crashes into the WTC. Even at significantly less than their top speed of 1500 mph, they could still have defended the skies over Washington well before 9am, more than 37 minutes before Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, however, they did not return until after 9:55am.

Andrews AFB had no armed fighters on alert and ready to take off on the morning of 9/11.

CS – Number 7; WTC Building 7. Watch the video of its collapse.

CS – Number 8; Flight 93 is fourth plane to crash on 9/11 at 10:03am. V.P. Cheney only gives shoot down order at 10:10-10:20am and this is not communicated to NORAD until 28 minutes after Flight 93 has crashed.

Fueling further suspicion on this front is the fact that three months before the attacks of 9/11, Dick Cheney usurped control of NORAD, and therefore he, and no one else on planet Earth, had the power to call for military sorties on the hijacked airliners on 9/11. He did not exercise that power. Three months after 9/11, he relinquished command of NORAD and returned it to military operation.

CS – Number 9; Scores of main stream news outlets reported that the F.B.I. conducted an investigation of at least FIVE of the 9/11 hijackers being trained at U.S. military flight schools. Those investigations are now sealed and need to be declassified.

CS – Number 10; In 2004, New York firefighters Mike Bellone and Nicholas DeMasi went public to say they had found the black boxes at the World Trade Center, but were told to keep their mouths shut by FBI agents. Nicholas DeMasi said that he escorted federal agents on an all-terrain vehicle in October 2001 and helped them locate the devices, a story backed up by rescue volunteer Mike Bellone.

As the Philadelphia Daily News reported at the time, “Their story raises the question of whether there was a some type of cover-up at Ground Zero.”

CS – Number 11 – Hundreds of eye witnesses including first responders, fire captains, news reporters, and police, all described multiple explosions in both towers before and during the collapse.

CS – Number 12; An astounding video uncovered from the archives shows BBC News correspondent Jane Standley reporting on the collapse of WTC Building 7 over twenty minutes before it fell at 5:20pm on the afternoon of 9/11. Tapes from earlier BBC broadcasts show news anchors discussing the collapse of WTC 7 a full 26 minutes in advance. The BBC at first claimed that their tapes from 9/11 had been “lost” before admitting that they made the “error” of reporting the collapse of WTC 7 before it happened without adequately explaining how they could have obtained advance knowledge of the event.

In addition, over an hour before the collapse of WTC 7, at 4:10pm, CNN’s Aaron Brown reported that the building “has either collapsed, or is collapsing.”

CS – Number 13; Solicitor General Ted Olson’s claim that his wife Barbara Olsen called him twice from Flight 77, describing hijackers with box cutters, was a central plank of the official 9/11 story.

However, the credibility of the story was completely undermined after Olsen kept changing his story about whether his wife used her cell phone or the airplane phone. The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004. American Airlines confirmed that Flight 77 was a Boeing 757 and that this plane did not have airplane phones on board.

According to the FBI, Barbara Olsen attempted to call her husband only once and the call failed to connect, therefore Olsen must have been lying when he claimed he had spoken to his wife from Flight 77.

CS – Number 14; The size of a Boeing 757 is approximately 125ft in width and yet images of the impact zone at the Pentagon supposedly caused by the crash merely show a hole no more than 16ft in diameter. The engines of the 757 would have punctured a hole bigger than this, never mind the whole plane. Images before the partial collapse of the impact zone show little real impact damage and a sparse debris field completely inconsistent with the crash of a large jetliner, especially when contrasted with other images showing airplane crashes into buildings.

CS – Number 15; What is the meaning behind the following quote attributed to Dick Cheney which came to light during the 9/11 Commission hearings? The passage is taken from testimony given by then Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta.

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

As the plane was not shot down, in addition to the fact that armed fighter jets were nowhere near the plane and the Pentagon defensive system was not activated, are we to take it that the orders were to let the plane find its target?

CS – Number 16; In May 2003, the Miami Herald reported how the Bush administration was refusing to release a 900-page congressional report on 9/11 because it wanted to “avoid enshrining embarrassing details in the report,” particularly regarding pre-9/11 warnings as well as the fact that the hijackers were trained at U.S. flight schools.

CS – Number 17; Top Pentagon officials cancelled their scheduled flights for September 11th on September 10th. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, following a security warning, cancelled a flight into New York that was scheduled for the morning of 9/11.

CS – Number 18; The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004, and even by that point it was only in the trial phase. Calls from cell phones which formed an integral part of the official government version of events were technologically impossible at the time.

CS – Number 19: On April 29, 2004, President Bush and V.P. Cheney would only meet with the commission under specific clandestine conditions. They insisted on testifying together and not under oath. They also demanded that their testimony be treated as a matter of “state secret.” To date, nothing they spoke of that day exists in the public domain.

CS – And finally Mr. President – Number 20; A few days after the attack, several newspapers as well as the FBI reported that a paper passport had been found in the ruins of the WTC. In August 2004, CNN reported that 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah’s visa was found in the remains of Flight 93 which went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

At least a third of the WTC victim’s bodies were vaporized and many of the victims of the Pentagon incident were burned beyond recognition. And yet visas and paper passports which identify the perpetrators and back up the official version of events miraculously survive explosions and fires that we are told melted steel buildings.

(The Senior aide appears again beside the President whispering in his ear. He then quickly moves off).

PBO – Well Charlie I can’t say this hasn’t been interesting. As I said earlier you’ve showed up today focused and organized. Regardless how I feel about the material you’ve presented, I must commend your dedication and zeal. However, our time here is up.

(the President rises from his chair , I do the same).

CS – Mr. President! One more second!

(The President starts towards the door – I follow him quickly step for step).

CS – Mr. President, I implore you based on the evidence you now possess, to use your Executive Power. Prove to us all Sir, that you do, in fact, care. Create a truly comprehensive and open Congressional investigation of 9/11 and its aftermath. The families deserve the truth, the American people and the rest of the free world deserve the truth. Mr. President –

(He pauses. We shake hands).

CS – Make sure you’re on the right side of history.

(The President breaks the handshake).

PBO – I am on the right side of history. Thank you Charlie, my staff and I will be in touch.

(I watch as he strides gracefully out of the room, the truth I provided him held firmly by his side; in the hand of providence.)

————————————————————————————————————————

A comprehensive bibliography containing all of the evidence presented above can be viewed at http://www.prisonplanet.com/20_minutes_bibliography.html

Get this interview in PDF format here.

Author’s Note: What you have just read didn’t actually happen… yet.

This is an open letter to the President requesting a new investigation.

Charlie Sheen.

Charlie Sheen is going to be on Alex Jones’ syndicated radio show live twice this week. This letter to the President is only the opening salvo in a chain of key events. Read more details here and tune in at 11am CST when Alex will lay out this exciting new development. Sheen first appeared on The Alex Jones Show in March 2006 to air his doubts about the official 9/11 story, an interview that garnered national attention and put the issue of 9/11 truth at the forefront of public debate.

For media requests on this subject email sheen@infowars.com.


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Activist Releases Archive of Suppressed News Videos

Activist Releases Archive of Suppressed News Videos

James Corbett
The Corbett Report
Wednesday, Sept 2, 2009

In a move sure to send shockwaves through the online activist community, Jonathon Elinoff—activist, researcher, and the filmmaker behind the Core of Corruption documentary series—has released a video archive of dozens of network news broadcasts detailing controversial and suppressed news stories.

The archive, compiled over a period of several years, features actual network news coverage of the Trilateral Commission, the shadow government that went into operation on 9/11, the Bohemian Grove and numerous other topics that the nightly news almost never mentions. Many of the videos (if not all) are being released online for the first time.

How Close the Bush Bullet


Published on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 by Consortium News
How Close the Bush Bullet
by Robert Parry

Earlier this decade when some of us warned that George W. Bush was behaving more like an incipient dictator than the leader of a constitutional republic, we were dismissed as alarmists, left-wingers, traitors and a host of less printable epithets.

But it is now increasingly clear that President Bush and his top advisers viewed the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to implement a series of right-wing legal theories that secretly granted Bush unlimited power to act lawlessly and outside the traditional parameters of the U.S. Constitution.

These theories held that at a time of war – even one as vaguely defined as the “war on terror” – Bush’s powers as Commander in Chief were “plenary,” or total. And since the conflict against terrorism had no boundaries in time or space, his unfettered powers would exist everywhere and essentially forever.

According to his administration’s secret legal memos released Monday, Bush could waive all meaningful constitutional rights of citizens, including the First Amendment’s protections on free speech and a free press.

John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel – which advises a President on the limits of his constitutional powers – declared that Bush could void the First Amendment if he deemed it necessary to fight terrorism.

“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Yoo wrote in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”

Yoo then added ominously, “The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

What was particularly stunning about Yoo’s reference to waiving the First Amendment – a pillar of American democracy – was his cavalier attitude. He tossed the paragraph into a memo focused on stripping Americans of their Fourth Amendment “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

While saying that Bush could order spying on and military attacks against U.S. domestic targets at his own discretion as Commander in Chief, Yoo added, almost in passing, that the President also could abrogate the rights of free speech and a free press.

Wiping Out Public Trials

Another Yoo memo, dated June 27, 2002, essentially voided the Sixth Amendment and a federal law guaranteeing Americans the right to public trials. In the memo, Yoo asserted that Bush had the power to declare American citizens “enemy combatants” and detain them indefinitely.

“The President’s power to detain enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens, is based on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief,” Yoo wrote, adding that “Congress may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

Yoo acknowledged that in “war on terror” cases, an “enemy combatant” may have no formal connection to an enemy group, may have no weapon, and may have no discernable plan for carrying out a terrorist attack. In other words, an “enemy combatant” could be anyone that Bush so designated.

Under Yoo’s analysis, an alleged “enemy combatant” would have no legal recourse, since Bush’s Commander in Chief powers trumped even habeas corpus requirements that the government must show cause for imprisoning someone. Further, this opinion wasn’t just hypothesizing; it provided the legal basis for indefinitely detaining U.S. citizen Jose Padilla.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately issued a narrow 5-4 decision overturning Bush’s supposed right to deny habeas corpus and punish “enemy combatants” through his own military court system, many of Yoo’s concepts survived in the Military Commissions Act, which was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2006.

While the law appears on the surface to target only non-citizens, fine print deep in the legislation makes clear that the Bush administration still was asserting its power to detain U.S. citizens who were viewed as aiding and abetting foreign enemies and to punish those citizens through military commissions that denied normal due-process rights to defendants.

“Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission,” the law states, adding that “any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States … shall be punished as a military commission … may direct.”

The reference to people acting “in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States” would not apply to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda but would cover American citizens.

The Military Commissions Act remains in effect to this day, although President Barack Obama has vowed not to apply it, favoring use of regular civilian or military courts.

Loss of First Amendment

Though some of us have cited Bush’s determination to override key constitutional protections for years (see, for instance, our book Neck Deep), few critics – including me – thought to include the notion that Bush was interested in suspending the First Amendment.

The significance of Yoo’s throwaway paragraph about throwing away the First Amendment is that it suggests that the Bush administration intended as early as October 2001 to act against journalists and citizens who were viewed as undermining Bush’s “war on terror” through public comments or disclosures.

As a right-wing legal scholar, Yoo surely shared the Right’s knee-jerk animosity toward past reporting on the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War’s Pentagon Papers, as well as contempt for Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War.

But his First Amendment reference also may have reflected the thinking of senior Bush aides in those early days of the “war on terror” as they collaborated with Yoo in formulating his legal opinions.

In his 2006 book War by Other Means, Yoo describes his participation in frequent White House meetings regarding what “other means” should receive a legal stamp of approval. Yoo said the “meetings were usually chaired by Alberto Gonzales,” then White House counsel, and involved Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington.

So, a seemingly incongruous reference to overriding the First Amendment – in a memo centered on overriding the Fourth Amendment – could be explained by the desire of White House officials to have some legal cover for actions aimed at journalists who were exposing secrets or whose reporting might weaken the national resolve behind Bush’s actions.

It also suggests that Bush’s critics who exercised their free speech rights in challenging his “war on terror” could have become targets of special government operations justified under Bush’s Commander in Chief powers.

In other words, Bush’s assault on America’s constitutional Republic may have been more aggressive than many of us imagined. It was a bullet that came close to the heart of a dream dating back to 1776.

© 2009 Consortium News
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’.


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George Bush’s Gift To The World: The End of American Imperialism

Published on Friday, January 30, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
George Bush’s Gift To The World: The End of American Imperialism
by David Michael Green

George W. Bush was unquestionably the worst American president in the two and a quarter centuries of the country’s existence.
After all, James Buchanan, the previous aspirant to the title, merely did nothing while the South seceded. Hah! You’ll have to do better than that, Jimmy, if you want to wear this crown!

Bush did far better, of course. It would appear to be the one thing in his entire life he actually worked hard at, and the one challenge he was able to meet successfully. This was an astonishingly destructive presidency, that’s true even despite the fact that we don’t really know much about his administration, because in addition to being the worst, it was also the most secretive ever. (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, too.) Moreover, that’s also even considering that most Americans still vastly underestimate the depravity of Team Bush. As I have argued previously, if you think they were ‘merely’ arrogant bunglers with exceptionally bad politics, you’ve grossly underestimated them. In fact, they were predators who launched their class warfare agenda behind the smoke-screen of national security, faux patriotism and secret government.

Does this record of unparalleled devastation mean that Bush never did anything right in eight years? No, though it’s pretty much the case that he never did anything right on purpose.

Unquestionably, however, Bush did make some positive contributions to American life, even if they were completely inadvertent, and even if they were dwarfed by the swath of destruction he left all across the landscape. Put simply, George W. Bush’s greatest success was that he gave a very bad name to very bad things.

Like the Republican Party, for example. Or conservative ideology. Or theocracy. Or presidents with the last name of Bush. Or emotional midgets who seek the White House as a salve for their personal psychological neediness.

We can be grateful for all these contributions, and I certainly am – though “thanks” is not likely what I would say if I had the pleasure of relating my assessment of Mr. Bush to him directly. More likely it would be something closer to the gracious words Dick “Dick” Cheney had for Patrick Leahy early on in the administration, when the two bumped into each other on the Senate floor. Those remarks were not, shall we say, fit for print in a family newspaper.

But I digress.

George Bush left us many gifts, but perhaps the greatest of them is that he has ruined the sport of imperialism in America, maybe forever.

Admittedly, that may of course be wishful thinking. Woe be unto the world, for example, should there be another 9/11 type of event. Somebody somewhere would have to pay in spades, and they likely wouldn’t be nice white folks.

And god only knows, alternatively, what Americans might be capable of under conditions of real resource deprivation. Considering what we’ve already done while being the richest and most powerful country in the world, it’s scary to think of what we could do with our back genuinely to the wall.

But leaving those unusual situations aside, it must be said that, after Iraq, the fun has really gone out of eviscerating small foreign countries, even those foolish enough to locate themselves on top of our oil.

Imperialism used to be a fairly sporting avocation for gentlemen of a certain class. You could occupy hapless Latin American countries, topple Iranian democracies, and simultaneously sponsor apartheid suppression of whole populations, still having time left by mid-afternoon for a couple belts with the boys down at the club, all in celebration of a good day’s work at the office. It was jolly good fun for all. Except, of course, for all for whom it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, that latter category included more or less the entirety of the southern hemisphere, and not a few in the north to boot. But, so what? We’re Americans! Caring about the morality of imperialism is for pre-dictatorship revolutionary anti-colonialist leaders and washed-up European former empires who can’t get it up anymore.

Truth be told, we’re now closer to being in that latter category than not, and we can thank George W. Bush for that, one of the few contributions of this complete and utter disaster going by the name of the 43rd presidency.

I’d say we’re more than a bit lucky for that outcome, too. Imagine if Iraq had been a success. Imagine if it had been the cakewalk they obviously thought it would be. Indeed, one of the great ironies of American politics is that Iraq probably readily could have been a ‘great success’, at least in terms of what could be marketed as such to a foolish American public.

In that sense, we are really quite fortunate, in a perverse sort of way, that Bush was as much a lazy boob as he was a warmonger. We are lucky that Rumsfeld was as dogmatic about his 21 century military ideas as Cheney was a completely psycho amoral sociopath. For had they simply run an occupation that was as carefully planned and as adequately staffed as the invasion, or had they toppled Saddam and then promptly left, “Mission Accomplished” would have been a lot more than some banner duct-taped onto the bridge of an aircraft carrier.

And that would have been very bad news indeed for the rest of the world. Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba – there’s no telling where they might have gone next, and likely with the full support of the American public, at that point popping the buttons off their jingoistic shirts (made in Thailand, of course), their chests puffed out to the wall.

Americans were already growing dubious of regressive exploits in international adventurism, it seems to me. I remember laughing at the senior Bush, whose first pronouncement after defeating the pathetically under-matched Iraqi military in 1991 was “By God, we’ve licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” Yeah, he actually said that. All I could think at the time was, if you have to say it, dude, it ain’t really happenin’. And all I can think now is, out of 300 million people in this country, did we really go to the Bush family twice to staff the presidency?

But, in fact, the Vietnam syndrome had not been licked. That war was a traumatic experience, and it changed public perceptions about the desirability of war itself. On top of which, America was not completely immune to the general Western post-World War II movement away from militarism as a means of settling disputes. Then there’s always been our long-standing vision of ourselves as both peace-loving and anti-imperialistic – however absurd those perceptions often were in light of actual practice. These also provided at least a speed-bump along the road to war in all but the more obvious cases.

Indeed, two things about public opinion and war in America struck me as pretty notable, but not much noted, these last years. One is that there was a surprising – I thought – lack of blood lust after 9/11. I guess part of that was that there was no state enemy to be attacked, as there had been in the past, and part of that was the foregone conclusion that we would be invading Afghanistan. But, really, I’m surprised there wasn’t a far more intense call for revenge. As one measure of the absence of this, consider that Osama bin Laden still has not been captured or killed, almost a decade (!) later, and that nobody seems much to care about that or mention it very often.

The other thing worth noting is that the public was, in fact, dubious about the Iraq invasion, right up until the weeks before. People realized that it was bogus, at some basic level, and they certainly had a hard time connecting it to 9/11. It took a marketing full-court press to eventually garner public support for the war (America’s pathetic excuse for a Congress was a lot easier to roll). It never worked abroad (another reason Americans were a bit slower to come on-board), but in the context of post-9/11 fears, a general tendency to trust the president, and the regressive movement’s prowess at equating militarism with patriotism, the Madison Avenue campaign finally produced a tenuous majority support for the Iraq invasion in the weeks right before it actually went down.

I think it’s slightly encouraging that, even in that context, it still took a real effort to sell the war. It’s also seriously discouraging, on the other hand, that it could be sold, and that it was. But, as noted, this was a tenuous acceptance. Had the war gone well it would have amplified the militarism in the Bush team and the country’s willingness to let them run rampant. Since it went disastrously, it had the opposite effect.

Iraq is probably not the last time America will go to war. But I think it’s fair to say that this country – its nose once more bloodied by a stupid imperial adventure, stupidly prosecuted – will be that much more reticent to repeat the experience. We do learn in America. It is often a painfully slow process, sometimes punctuated by reverse trajectories (can you say ‘creation science’), but we do occasionally exhibit the classic clinical signs of a student who can be taught, however reluctantly and inadvertantly.

And thus we owe a debt of gratitude to the Iraqis, perhaps a million of whom have been murdered, another four or five million dislocated, and countless others wounded – emotionally, if not physically, if not both – for helping us to learn. And the people of Syria and Iran and much of the rest of the developing world owe these Iraqis thanks as well, for giving the US pause from invading other countries at will.

America’s place in the world is likely to be entering a new period now, for several reasons. One is that the low-key successes of the Obama administration will help underscore the sheer lunacy of the Bush years, and all the policies associated with them. Another is that we are rapidly coming face-to-face with the reality that empire is expensive. As our standards of living go from mere steady decline to sheer precipitous decline, you’ll know that we’ve actually turned that corner when mainstream politicians finally have the courage to talk about scaling back expenditures on the obscenely bloated American military machine.

But, in the end, it may truthfully be said that no one did more to discourage American militaristic tendencies than Jingo George, himself, however odd that may seem.

And, who knows? If I ever met him, maybe I could even bring myself to thank him for that, after all.

But only, of course, from above, after I had decked him.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, http://www.regressiveantidote.net.


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The Money Masters – How International Bankers Gained Control of America

I wouldn’t call this entertainment, but I guarantee you it’s the best 3.5 hours you’ll ever invest in your education. This amazing 3.5 hour documentary will teach you the entire history of money and banking, how it works and how the central bankers have robbed the wealth of nations, including our own. You’ll discover how bankers create the illusion that they have all the wealth, and how they get governments, corporations and all of us indebted to them, the primary mechanism they use to control virtually everything. You’ll also learn how they are the primary cause of all inflation, start virtually every war, and how they are engineering a world government and monetary system that they alone control…

Also watch FIREWALL: (http://newsbrowser.org/firewall/)

“The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world’s money”
THE MONEY MASTERS is a 3 1/2 hour non-fiction, historical documentary that traces the origins of the political power structure that rules our nation and the world today. The modern political power structure has its roots in the hidden manipulation and accumulation of gold and other forms of money. The development of fractional reserve banking practices in the 17th century brought to a cunning sophistication the secret techniques initially used by goldsmiths fraudulently to accumulate wealth. With the formation of the privately-owned Bank of England in 1694, the yoke of economic slavery to a privately-owned “central” bank was first forced upon the backs of an entire nation, not removed but only made heavier with the passing of the three centuries to our day. Nation after nation, including America, has fallen prey to this cabal of international central bankers.

Segments: The Problem; The Money Changers; Roman Empire; The Goldsmiths of Medieval England; Tally Sticks; The Bank of England; The Rise of the Rothschilds; The American Revolution; The Bank of North America; The Constitutional Convention; First Bank of the U.S.; Napoleon’s Rise to Power; Death of the First Bank of the U.S. / War of 1812; Waterloo; Second Bank of the U.S.; Andrew Jackson; Fort Knox; World Central Bank;

Also recommended: “Firewall: In Defense of the Nation State”
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=8415519765816415310

Video news on “Federal Reserve”: http://newstree.org/search.jsp?query=Federal+Reserve&hp=10&s=Video&vx=1


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